A Report On The E-C Translation Of Dying In Character:Memoirs On The End Of Life (Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Peter Newmark’s Translation Theory

The source text of this practice report is taken from Chapters 1,Chapter 6 and Conclusion of Dying in Character:Memoirs on the End of Life by American writer Jeffrey Berman.The memoir is written in a humorous and objective style,recording the author’s own experience of a car accident and exploring different writers’ views and attitudes towards death.The source text serves expressive function,informative function and vocative function.At present,most translation reports of memoirs focus on memoirs’ "authenticity" and "literariness",or regarding them merely as expressive texts.However,these reports neglect the exact lingistic style of the text.So in the present report,Peter Newmark is used for the guidance of this translation report.Based on Buhler’s functional theory of language,Peter Newmark divides text into three types:Expressive Texts,Informative Texts,and Vocative Texts.In Dying in character:Memoirs on the end of life,when telling his own story,the author’s language style is personal and the content is straightforward.For these parts,the text fits well with the expressive text.When describing other writers in the following chapters,the language style is sometimes objective and the content is informative.For these parts,the text can be classified into the informative text.In the conclusion part,the author narrates and encourages people to read and write memoirs.The text fits well with the vocative text.In translation of selected chapters in Dying in character:Memoirs on the end of life,the author of this report analyzes the key and difficult points and translation skills employed in this translation practice.Under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s theory,for expressive parts in the memoir,translation techniques of annotation and extension are discussed and analyzed by means of the principle of semantic translation;for informative and vocative parts in the memoir,translation skills of conversion,addition,negation and restructuring sentences are analyzed as a way of communicative translation.